What if?

What if …? The dreaded question popped into my head. I panicked; I pondered. I pondered further and the moment passed, but I did nothing. Like a smoldering fire the thought still lingers “What if…?”

What and if are such benign words, but put them together they have the power to haunt you, or excite you incessantly. I heard some version of this quote in a movie whose name I can't remember, but it’s stuck in my head. The beauty of the statement is that it holds true for the most mundane to the most profound of life’s questions. What if I skip running today? What if I said “No” to my dearest friend? What if I ask that girl out? What if I tell my boss what’s really on my mind?

We can choose to imagine the worst, choose to ponder forever, and choose not to act. Then the “What if?” will haunt us for a lifetime. But, on the contrary, if we choose not to obsess over it endlessly and choose to act based on our best judgment at that moment, we stand a chance of realizing our desires and dreams. What if we fail? Often it’s our irrational fear of failure or our pursuit of an unrealistic version of “perfection” that holds us back from realizing our dreams and living a fulfilling life. Life is about taking chances and embracing failure. I guarantee, at some point in our life we will all fail. I hope we have the wisdom to know that no matter how bad it feels at that time, life will go on, dare I say happily, if we choose it to. The choice is ours though. It is not the circumstances that make us happy or sad, but our choices and our outlook on the consequences.

So I hope the next time the question, “What if ?” flashes in my mind, I have wisdom to make the right choice, courage to overcome my fears, integrity to go through with it, but above all the grace and serenity to accept the consequences.